Fedora 15 talking points

From FedoraProject

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 15 release. For information on how these talking points were chosen, see Talking Points SOP. They are intended to help Ambassadors quickly present an overview of highlighted features when talking about the release.

The talking points are based in part on the features for this release. Any Fedora community member can introduce a feature, using our feature process.

For desktop users and everyone

GNOME 3 Feature

GNOME 3 is the next major version of the GNOME desktop. GNOME 3 brings a fresh look and feel with gnome-shell, which is a compositing window manager and desktop shell. It replaces the GNOME 2 desktop shell, which consisted of metacity, gnome-panel, notification-daemon and nautilus. Apart from pure window management, gnome-shell provides the top bar on the screen, which hosts the 'system status' area in the top right, a clock in the center, and a hot corner that switches to the so-called 'overview' mode, which provides easy access to applications and windows.

LibreOffice Feature

LibreOffice(R) is an office productivity suite that will replace OpenOffice(R). It will be completely open source and driven solely by the community supporting it. It has a word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet creator, database creator, formula editor, and drawing editor.

Power Management Feature

Go Green. Power Management improvements include the PowerTOP tool,
which identifies the software components that make your computer use
more energy than necessary while idle. Automatic tuning of power
consumption and performance helps conserve on laptop battery usage,
too!

For administrators

Consistent Network Device Naming Feature

Servers often have multiple Ethernet ports, either embedded on the motherboard, or on add-in PCI cards. Linux has traditionally named these ports ethX, but there has been no correlation of the ethX names to the chassis labels - the ethX names are non-deterministic. Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations, rather than ethX. Ethernet ports embedded on server motherboards will be named em<port_number>, while ports on PCI cards will be named pci<slot_number>p<port_number>, corresponding to the chassis labels. Additionally, if the network device is an SR-IOV Virtual Function or has Network Partitioning (NPAR) capability, the name will have a suffix of _<virtual_function> or _<partition>.

By changing the naming convention, system administrators will no longer have to guess at the ethX to physical port mapping, or invoke workarounds on each system to rename them into some "sane" order.

This feature affects all physical systems that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later (specifically field types 9 and 41). Dell PowerEdge 10G and newer servers (PowerEdge 1950 III family, PowerEdge R710 family, and newer), and HP ProLiant G6 servers and newer are known to expose this information, as do some newer desktop models. Furthermore, most older systems expose some information in the PCI IRQ Routing Table, which will be consulted if information is not provided by SMBIOS.

GCC 4.6 Feature

Maven 3 Feature

"[Maven] is a tool that can now be used for building and managing any Java-based project. We hope that we have created something that will make the day-to-day work of Java developers easier and generally help with the comprehension of any Java-based project."